Eyebrows were raised last week when three members of the Federal Reserve Board’s Federal Open Market Committee dissented from the decision to keep interest rates steady as they are through 2013. Deliberations of the FOMC traditionally issue in unanimous decisions, but unanimity is all the more difficult to achieve when the usual political and policy prescriptions in the nation’s capital have failed to bring the economy out of a deep recession. One of the dissenters was Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. In a speech reported by the Hill, Fischer offered some trenchant observations about why businesses aren’t hiring new workers or expanding operations and why they likely won’t be for some time to come.

“They simply cannot budget or manage for the uncertainty of fiscal and regulatory policy,” Fisher said. “There is palpable angst surrounding the cost of doing business. According to my business contacts, the opera buffa of the debt-ceiling negotiations compounded this uncertainty, leaving business decision makers frozen in their tracks.” And noting that the recent debt-ceiling deal delayed most of the hard work on cutting the federal budget, he predicted that “it will be devilishly difficult for businesses to commit to adding significantly to their head count or to meaningful capital expansion in the United States until clarity is achieved on the particulars of how Congress will bend the curve of the deficit and debt expansion.”